A Short History of Myth Page 2

  Some of the very earliest myths, probably dating back to the Palaeolithic period, were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the sky – infinite, remote and existing quite apart from their puny lives – people had a religious experience.8 The sky towered above them, inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness. Human beings could do nothing to affect it. The endless drama of its thunderbolts, eclipses, storms, sunsets, rainbows and meteors spoke of another endlessly active dimension, which had a dynamic life of its own. Contemplating the sky filled people with dread and delight, with awe and fear. The sky attracted them and repelled them. It was by its very nature numinous, in the way described by the great historian of religion, Rudolf Otto. In itself, without any imaginary deity behind it, the sky was mysterium tremendum, terribile et fascinans.9

  This introduces us to an essential element of both the mythical and the religious consciousness. In our sceptical age, it is often assumed that people are religious because they want something from the gods they worship. They are trying to get the Powers That Be on their side. They want long life, freedom from sickness, and immortality, and think that the gods can be persuaded to grant them these favours. But in fact this very early hierophany shows that worship does not necessarily have a self-serving agenda. People did not want anything from the sky, and knew perfectly well that they could not affect it in any way. From the very earliest times, we have experienced our world as profoundly mysterious; it holds us in an attitude of awe and wonder, which is the essence of worship. Later the people of Israel would use the word qaddosh to denote the sacred. It was ‘separate, other’. The experience of pure transcendence was in itself profoundly satisfying. It gave people an ecstatic experience by making them aware of an existence that utterly transcended their own, and lifted them emotionally and imaginatively beyond their own limited circumstances. It was inconceivable that the sky could be ‘persuaded’ to do the will of poor, weak human beings.

  The sky would continue to be a symbol of the sacred long after the Palaeolithic period. But a very early development showed that mythology would fail if it spoke of a reality that was too transcendent. If a myth does not enable people to participate in the sacred in some way, it becomes remote and fades from their consciousness. At some point – we do not know exactly when this happened – people in various far-flung parts of the world began to personify the sky. They started to tell stories about a ‘Sky God’ or ‘High God’, who had single-handedly created heaven and earth out of nothing. This primitive monotheism almost certainly dates back to the Palaeolithic period. Before they began to worship a number of deities, people in many parts of the world acknowledged only one Supreme God, who had created the world and governed human affairs from afar.

  Nearly every pantheon has its Sky God. Anthropologists have also found Him among such tribal peoples as the Pygmies, the Australians and the Fuegians.10 He is First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth. He is never represented by images and has no shrine or priest, because he is too exalted for a human cult. The people yearn toward their High God in prayer, believe that he is watching over them and will punish wrongdoing. Yet he is absent from their daily lives. The tribesmen say that he is inexpressible and can have no dealings with the world of men. They may turn to him in a crisis, but he is otherwise absent and is often said to have ‘gone away’, or ‘disappeared’.

  The Sky Gods of the ancient Mesopotamians, Vedic Indians, Greeks and Canaanites all dwindled in this way. In all the mythology of all these peoples, the High God is at best a shadowy, powerless figure, marginal to the divine pantheon, and more dynamic, interesting and accessible deities, such as Indra, Enlil and Baal, had come to the fore. There are stories that explain how the High God was deposed: Ouranos, the Sky God of the Greeks, for example, was actually castrated by his son Kronos, in a myth that horribly illustrates the impotence of these Creators, who were so removed from the ordinary lives of human beings that they had become peripheral. People experienced the sacred power of Baal in every rainstorm; they felt the force of Indra every time they were possessed by the transcendent fury of battle. But the old Sky Gods did not touch people’s lives at all. This very early development makes it clear that mythology will not succeed if it concentrates on the supernatural; it will only remain vital if it is primarily concerned with humanity.

  The fate of the Sky God reminds us of another popular misconception. It is often assumed that the early myths gave people in the pre-scientific world information about the origin of the cosmos. The story of the Sky God represented exactly this type of speculation, but the myth was a failure, because it did not touch people’s ordinary lives, told them nothing about their human nature and did not help them to solve their perennial problems. The demise of the Sky Gods helps to explain why the Creator God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims has disappeared from the lives of many people in the West. A myth does not impart factual information, but is primarily a guide to behaviour. Its truth will only be revealed if it is put into practice – ritually or ethically. If it is perused as though it were a purely intellectual hypothesis, it becomes remote and incredible.

  The High Gods may have been demoted, but the sky never lost its power to remind people of the sacred. Height has remained a mythical symbol of the divine – a relic of Palaeolithic spirituality. In mythology and mysticism, men and women regularly reach for the sky, and devise rituals and techniques of trance and concentration that enable them to put these ascension stories into practice and ‘rise’ to a ‘higher’ state of consciousness. Sages claim that they have mounted through the various levels of the celestial world until they reach the divine sphere. Yoga practitioners are said to fly through the air; mystics levitate; prophets climb high mountains and break into a more sublime mode of being.11 When people aspired towards the transcendence represented by the sky, they felt that they could escape from the frailty of the human condition and pass to what lies beyond. That is why mountains are so often holy in mythology: midway between heaven and earth, they were a place where men such as Moses could meet their god. Myths about flight and ascent have appeared in all cultures, expressing a universal desire for transcendence and liberation from the constraints of the human condition. These myths should not be read literally. When we read of Jesus ascending to heaven, we are not meant to imagine him whirling through the stratosphere. When the Prophet Muhammad flies from Mecca to Jerusalem and then climbs up a ladder to the Divine Throne, we are to understand that he has broken through to a new level of spiritual attainment. When the Prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot, he has left the frailty of the human condition behind, and passed away into the sacred realm that lies beyond our earthly experience.

  Scholars believe that the very first myths of ascent date back to the Palaeolithic period, and that they were associated with the shaman, the chief religious practitioner of hunting societies. The shaman was a master of trance and ecstasy, whose visions and dreams encapsulated the ethos of the hunt, and gave it a spiritual meaning. The hunt was highly dangerous. Hunters would leave their tribe for days at a time, would have to relinquish the security of their cave, and risk their lives to bring food back to their people. But, as we shall see, it was not merely a pragmatic enterprise, but, like all their activities, had a transcendent dimension. The shaman also embarked on a quest, but his was a spiritual expedition. It was thought that he had the power to leave his body and to travel in spirit to the celestial world. When he fell into a trance, he flew through the air and communed with the gods for the sake of his people.

  In the Palaeolithic cave shrines of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, we find paintings depicting the hunt; alongside the animals and the huntsmen, there are men wearing bird masks, suggestive of flight, who were probably shamans. Even today, in hunting societies from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego, shamans believe that when they go into a trance they ascend t
o heaven and speak with the gods, as all humans did long ago in the Golden Age. A shaman is given special training in the techniques of ecstasy. Sometimes he suffers a psychotic breakdown during his adolescence, which represents a severance from his old profane consciousness and the recovery of powers that were given to the very earliest human beings but which have now been lost. In special ritual sessions, the shaman falls into a trance to the accompaniment of drums and dancing. Often he climbs a tree or a post that symbolises the Tree, Mountain or Ladder that once linked heaven and earth.12 A modern shaman describes his journey through the depths of the earth to heaven in this way:

  When the people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far… When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south … and when you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small … You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everybody is.13

  Like the dangerous expedition of the hunter, the shaman’s quest is a confrontation with death. When he returns to his community his soul is still absent from his body, and he has to be revived by colleagues, who ‘take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die … you just die and are dead.’14

  Spiritual flight does not involve a physical journey, but an ecstasy in which the soul is felt to leave the body. There can be no ascent to the highest heaven without a prior descent into the depths of the earth. There can be no new life without death. The themes of this primitive spirituality would recur in the spiritual journeys undertaken by mystics and yogins in all cultures. It is highly significant that these myths and rituals of ascension go back to the earliest period of human history. It means that one of the essential yearnings of humanity is the desire to get ‘above’ the human state. As soon as human beings had completed the evolutionary process, they found that a longing for transcendence was built into their condition.

  Shamans operate only in hunting societies, and animals play an important role in their spirituality. During his training, a modern shaman sometimes lives with animals in the wild. He is supposed to meet an animal, who will instruct him in the secrets of ecstasy, teach him animal language, and become his constant companion. This is not regarded as a regression. In hunting societies, animals are not seen as inferior beings, but have superior wisdom. They know the secrets of longevity and immortality, and, by communing with them, the shaman gains an enhanced life. In the Golden Age, before the fall, it is thought that human beings could talk with animals, and, until he has recovered this prelapsarian skill, a shaman cannot ascend to the divine world.15 But his journey also has a practical objective. Like the hunter, he brings food to his people. In Greenland, for example, the Eskimos believe that the seals belong to a goddess, who is called the Mistress of Animals. When there is a shortage of game, the shaman is dispatched to appease her and end the famine.16

  It is likely that the Palaeolithic peoples had similar myths and rites. It is a crucial fact that homo sapiens was also ‘the hunter ape’, who preyed on other animals, killed and ate them.17 Palaeolithic mythology also seems to have been characterised by great reverence for the animals that men now felt compelled to kill. Humans were ill-equipped for hunting, because they were weaker and smaller than most of their prey. They had to compensate for this by developing new weapons and techniques. But more problematic was a psychological ambivalence. Anthropologists note that modern indigenous peoples frequently refer to animals or birds as ‘peoples’ on the same level as themselves. They tell stories about humans becoming animals and vice versa; to kill an animal is to kill a friend, so tribesmen often feel guilt after a successful expedition. Because it is a sacred activity and charged with such high levels of anxiety, hunting is invested with ceremonial solemnity and surrounded with rites and taboos. Before an expedition, a hunter must abstain from sex and keep himself in a state of ritual purity; after the killing, the meat is stripped from the bones, and the skeleton, skull and pelt are carefully laid out in an attempt to reconstruct the animal and give it new life.18

  It seems that the very first hunters felt a similar ambivalence. They had to learn a hard lesson. In the pre-agricultural age, they could not grow their own food so the preservation of their own lives meant the destruction of other creatures to whom they felt closely akin. Their chief prey were the great mammals, whose bodies and facial expressions resembled their own. Hunters could see their fear and identify with their cries of terror. Their blood flowed like human blood. Faced with this potentially intolerable dilemma, they created myths and rituals that enabled them to come to terms with the murder of their fellow-creatures, some of which have survived in the mythologies of later cultures. People continued to feel unhappy about the slaughter and consumption of animals long after the Palaeolithic period. Central to almost all the religious systems of antiquity was the ritual of animal sacrifice, which preserved the old hunting ceremonies and honoured the beasts that laid down their lives for the sake of human beings.

  The first great flowering of mythology, therefore, came into being at a time when homo sapiens became homo necans, ‘man the killer’, and found it very difficult to accept the conditions of his existence in a violent world. Mythology often springs from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems, which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments. Human beings had been able to compensate for their physical disadvantages by developing the rational powers of their extraordinarily large brains when they developed their hunting skills. They invented weapons, and learned how to organise their society with maximum efficiency and to work together as a team. Even at this early stage, homo sapiens was developing what the Greeks would call logos, the logical, pragmatic and scientific mode of thought that enabled them to function successfully in the world.

  Logos is quite different from mythical thinking. Unlike myth, logos must correspond accurately to objective facts. It is the mental activity we use when we want to make things happen in the external world: when we organise our society or develop technology. Unlike myth, it is essentially pragmatic. Where myth looks back to the imaginary world of the sacred archetype or to a lost paradise, logos forges ahead, constantly trying to discover something new, to refine old insights, create startling inventions, and achieve a greater control over the environment. Myth and logos both have their limitations, however. In the pre-modern world, most people realised that myth and reason were complementary; each had its separate sphere, each its particular area of competence, and human beings needed both these modes of thought. A myth could not tell a hunter how to kill his prey or how to organise an expedition efficiently, but it helped him to deal with his complicated emotions about the killing of animals. Logos was efficient, practical and rational, but it could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life nor could it mitigate human pain and sorrow.19 From the very beginning, therefore, homo sapiens understood instinctively that myth and logos had separate jobs to do. He used logos to develop new weaponry, and myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile himself to the tragic facts of life that threatened to overwhelm him, and prevent him from acting effectively.

  The extraordinary underground caverns at Altamira and Lascaux give us a tantalising glimpse of Palaeolithic spirituality.20 The numinous paintings of deer, bison and woolly ponies, of shamans disguised as animals, and hunters with their spears, were painted with exquisite care and skill in deep subterranean caverns, which are extremely difficult of access. These grottoes were probably the very first temples and cathedrals. There has been lengthy academic discussion of the meaning of these caves; the paintings probably depict local legends that we shall never know. But certainly they set the scene for a profound meeting between men and the godlike, archetypal animals that adorn the cavern walls and ceilings. Pilgrims had to crawl through dank and dangerous underground tunnels before they reached the grottoe
s, burrowing ever more deeply into the heart of darkness until they finally came face to face with the painted beasts. We find here the same complex of images and ideas that inform the quest of the shaman. As in the shamanic sessions, there was probably music, dancing and singing in the caves; there was a journey to another world that began with a descent into the depths of the earth; and there was communion with animals in a magical dimension, set apart from the mundane, fallen world.

  The experience would have been especially powerful for newcomers, who had never ventured into the caverns before, and it seems likely that the caves were used in initiation rites that transformed the young men of the community into hunters. Initiation ceremonies were central to the religion of the ancient world, and remain crucial in traditional societies today.21 In tribal communities, adolescent boys are still torn away from their mothers, separated from the community, and forced to undergo an ordeal designed to transform them into men. Like the journey of the shaman, this is a process of death and rebirth: the boy has to die to childhood and enter the world of adult responsibilities. Initiates are buried in the ground, or in a tomb; they are told that they are about to be devoured by a monster, or killed by a spirit. They are subjected to intense physical pain and darkness; they are usually circumcised or tattooed. The experience is so intense and traumatic that an initiate is changed forever. Psychologists tell us that this type of isolation and deprivation not only brings about a regressive disorganisation of the personality, but that, if it is properly controlled, it can promote a constructive reorganisation of deeper forces within a person. At the end of his ordeal, the boy has learned that death is a new beginning. He returns to his people with a man’s body and soul. By facing up to the prospect of imminent death, and learning that it too is only a rite of passage to a new form of existence, he is ready to risk his life for his people by becoming a hunter or warrior.